Issue of global warming needs to be localized to encourage action

By Joanne Nesbit
News and Information Services

Students, faculty, and former students
from various U-M disciplines met last week with Secretary of the Interior
Bruce Babbitt for an informal conversation prior to his presentation, "Global
Warning: A Call for Action on Climate Change." Babbitt asked the 12
invited participants to help him find ways to dispel some of the mythology
attached to the reduction of fossil fuel consumption. That mythology, he
said, is being strengthened through a $13 million advertising barrage to
"emulate the success of the tobacco industry by denying the existence
of the problem, hiring a few wily pseudo-scientists, and to create enough
uncertainty that no one will take action."

There is a perception that the auto industry will fail, and that thousands
of people will be homeless if fossil fuel consumption is decreased, Babbitt
said. "What this is about is fuel consumption and not the demand for
automobiles," he said.

Babbitt told the audience that global warming due to carbon dioxide
pollution is not widely perceived as a problem. CO2 pollution
is not obvious, he said. "You can't see it, you can't taste it, you
can't smell it. But it is an intergenerational issue, with suggested implications
that even with a three- to five- degree increase in the mean temperature
worldwide, sea levels will rise three to five feet."

Babbitt accentuated his point by noting that Alaskan glaciers have shrunk
50 percent in the last 100 years, that one-third of the Everglades has
disappeared in the last century. Louisiana is shrinking by 40 square miles
a year due to rising waters, and predictions are that Bangladesh's 80 million
people will have to move somewhere as waters inundate that low-lying country.
And the mosquito vector already is moving northward, with all the health
risks associated with it right behind.

Reduced fossil fuel consumption will not decimate the auto industry,
Babbitt maintained. He believes innovations will strengthen the auto industry,
and challenges the audience in saying that college campuses will have to
provide the leadership in finding solutions to CO2 and resulting
global warming problems.

Agreeing that the issue of global warming and the effect of fuel emissions
on that warming is very complicated, participants suggested finding a way
to translate the global issue into a local one and stressing the impacts
of global warming on personal health.

Babbitt told the participants that even while he was a student at Notre
Dame, Ann Arbor always stood as a center for student activism. It is that
activism he was encouraging during his visit here.